Category: Geekery

Well, that didn’t last long

A few hours after my last post, as I slept not very soundly, the hard disk that kept dropping out of the RAID as it rebuilt dropped again. This morning, I booted in the the Seagate “SEATools” disk and gave it a full on test, and it found a metric buttload of bad sectors. Not good on a brand new disk, so off to the RMA process I go. The machine is up and running again, with /dev/md128 running as a “degraded RAID 1” (ie a single drive with no mirror).

Does anybody else find it pretty shitty that the vendor can ship you a defective drive, and then make you pay for the shipping to return it? Or that they won’t ship the replacement until they get the old one back? Seems to me that they could ship a replacement immediately with the proviso that they’ll charge your credit card for the drive if you don’t return the old one.

A new start

I decided I needed some more room on my home Linux box, so I bought a couple of 2TB disks. I also decided it was time to do a wipe and re-install because the box has been upgraded many times and there are several things that just don’t work right any more. So I burned a bunch of different distros onto CDs and experimented with them, and decided that Kubuntu is the best combination of beauty and power. None of the other distros except Debian allows you to set up lvm on RAID-1 while installing, and Debian looks like a bit of a dogs breakfast compared to Kubuntu, even in KDE.

The two new disks are so big that as it is, I’m only using them for the new installation, so the I can mount the old system under /old_system and I can compare everything to make sure I haven’t lost any important configuration. But eventually I’ll be able to delete those partitions and add them back to the free pool in the LV and use them to expand any of the actual in-use partitions. I love lvm.

Installation has gone ok, I’ve got about 3/4s of the things I need to get working again working again, but I’ve hit the usual string of snags. The biggest is that one of the two new disks keeps dropping out of the RAID1, so I have to keep adding it back in. I’ve rejiggered all the cables as best as I can, and hopefully it will rebuild overnight and it will be ok. Fingers crossed, I’m off to bed.

Probably time to throw in the towel on the waypoint generators

For years now I’ve been providing aeronautical data for various programs – The Wayback Machine shows it existing in 2001, but I’m pretty sure I was running it before then. The site hasn’t changed much visually since then, since I concentrated on providing good data rather than prettying up the site. But I thought I was providing a good free service and it was worth it to people. I didn’t really push it hard, but I did politely ask for donations, through Paypal and at one time through the “Amazon Honor System” until Amazon killed that. And for a long time, I made about 1/4 to 1/2 as much through that as it cost me in hosting and data costs. But that hasn’t been true for a long time. I just looked at my Paypal history for the last 12 months, and I got two donations of $25 each, one of $3.32 and one of $1.13 (yeah, go figure). $54.45 in a year. That’s it. That doesn’t keep me in thumb drives.

Add on to that the fact that my source of world-wide data, the DAFIF file, hasn’t been updated since 2006 and it’s increasingly been a “US data plus some airport data from here and there”, and I’m worried about presenting this to the world as useful data for anything. I’ve always staunchly maintained that this is just to save you from a bit of data entry for flight planning and not a substitute for official data sources, but it’s just embarrassing to think somebody is going to be looking for navaids and waypoints in Europe, say, and not finding anything that’s still in use. At least airports don’t tend to move around much.

And because the data I have is getting stale, I keep hoping that people would provide feedback on the data I have, offering to provide data for their area or just letting me know if something is wrong. At one time I had a couple of people sending me their data sets which I incorporated into the database. (Although I did have one set of data for Australia where all the airports had the sign of their longitude reversed – I’m pretty sure I purged the last of that.) That was actually more important than the donations to me. It showed people were using the data, and cared when it was wrong.

So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m reconsidering if it’s worth doing this. I’ll still maintain the data for the CoPilot iOS app, that’s a separate database and thanks to Laurie Davis I get world wide data from Eurocontrol that that. But next time I get a data dump from the FAA (September 19th), I’m going to give some thought over whether to load it into both database, or just the CoPilot iOS one.

Sure, I’ll get right on that

A guy I know has started a new micropayments web site called “Kachingle”. It’s a pretty cool idea – you sign up and install a browser plug-in, and they use that plug-in to allow you to say you want to “kachingle” web sites that you think need some money, and once you’ve signed up to kachingle a site, they track how often you visit that site. At the end of the month, they take $5 out of your paypal account, and distribute it to the owners of the sites you’re kachingling, divided proportionally to the number of times you visit them. I have firmly believed for some time now that the web needs a micropayment scheme that works, and if this hits critical mass it would be an awesome way to do it.

However, right now it’s in the growing stages, and there aren’t very many people using it. Which means that sites like this blog don’t exactly make enough money to retire on it. Here’s my latest statement.

I have to love the juxtaposition of the amount ($0.08) and Paypal’s glowing description of what I can do with that 8 cents. “Spend the money online at thousands of stores that accept PayPal”? I bet not many of them sell things that are 8 cents including shipping and handling.

Am I the only person who thinks this way?

I have a hybrid car, which gives a constant read-out of your average fuel economy, as well as giving you little visual indicators while you’re driving of whether you’re driving it “right” (upshift/downshift indicators, and a big glowing ring around the tach which goes from green to blue if you rev higher or accelerate faster) and when you turn off the car, you get a bar graph showing how economically you drove it, as well as “achievements” and “levels” if you’ve been driving economically for a while.

But like all cars, your average fuel economy for the trip is going to be higher for a longer trip than a shorter one, because the first 5-10 minutes of the trip is warming up the engine and getting the cabin up to the right temperature, etc. So when I’m going for a short trip, like going out for lunch, and trying to choose between two destinations, I have this internal dialog where I first argue for the longer trip to keep the average fuel economy up, but then I have to forcibly remind myself that sure the average is higher, but so is the total fuel burn and it makes no sense to burn more gas just to get a better average.

Somebody told me a while ago that I have an “external locus of control”. I think I’m just a geek.